It happens occasionally that I stumble upon the IMDb pages of made-for-television movies, usually from the 1970s, with incredibly high ratings and almost exclusively praising user-comments. I'm intrigued by those titles and promptly seek them out to watch next. Not necessarily because I'm convinced they truly will be great, but to try and capture the experience & emotions of all my fellow reviewers. For you see, most of the hyper-positive ratings and reviews are based on fond memories. Fans who watched the films on television, often just once and at a very young age. The films haven't been shown anywhere since and never got released on DVD, but they made an everlasting impression.
Please, do believe me when I state that I DO NOT consider those ratings and reviews invaluable or overly subjective. Quite the contrary, I'm often jealous that I was born in the wrong decade and truly wish to have been able to experience the glorious era of genuinely intelligent and qualitative movies for free on cable television! And - just to be clear - many of these TV-movies are REALLY good, like my most recent discoveries "One of my Wives is Missing" and this "Murder by Natural Causes".
The sadly forgotten gem "Murder by Natural Causes" is a tour-de-force collaboration of excellent writing (courtesy of the team behind "Columbo") and even better acting. What starts as a simple story about adultery and a banal conspiracy to murder an unsuspecting husband unfolds into a convoluted thriller with surprising twists and sardonic characters. Revealing anything about the plot would be a shame, but I guarantee you'll be glued to the screen and guessing. The unearthly beautiful Katharine Ross plays a role that is quite out of her comfort zone, but I've never seen her so sexy. Hal Holbrook, who's always been underrated in my opinion, is fantastic as the charismatic showman with a niftily constructed mind-reading act.
